Best known for her Gothic language handbooks (reissued recently as The New Well-Tempered Sentence and The Deluxe Transitive Vampire), Karen Elizabeth Gordon here turns her extraordinary talents to fiction, and the result is as unconventional as her seductive grammar dramas. The Red Shoes consists of tatters of a half-dozen tales ("The Glass Shoe," "The Gingerbread Variations," "The Little Match Girl," "Don Juan Is a Woman," and the title story, among others) sewn together into a novel by two seamstresses. "Fabric, fabrication--such is the stuff of these lost chronicles come together here," Gordon writes in her introduction. "Swinging their hatboxes, swaying their hips, chapters with torn slips wander in on high heels and blistered feet." Looking back to the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, but also casting sidelong glances at metafictional sugardaddies like Queneau, Nabokov, Cortazar, Gass, and Milorad Pavic, The Red Shoes is a Rabelaisian romp through the language of sensuality.

In his latest book, fairy tales expert Jack Zipes explores the question of why some fairy tales "work" and others don't, why the fairy tale is uniquely capable of getting under the skin of culture and staying there. Why, in other words, fairy tales "stick." Long an advocate of the fairy tale as a serious genre with wide social and cultural ramifications, Jack Zipes here makes his strongest case for the idea of the fairy tale not just as a collection of stories for children but a profoundly important genre. Why Fairy Tales Stick contains two chapters on the history and theory of the genre, followed by case studies of famous tales (including Cinderella, Snow White, and Bluebeard), followed by a summary chapter on the problematic nature of traditional storytelling in the twenty-first century.

Influential accounts of European cultural history variously suggest that the rise of nominalism and its ultimate victory over realist orientations were highly implemental factors in the formation of Modern Europe since the later Middle Ages, but particularly the Reformation. Quite probably, this is a simplification of a state of affairs that is in fact more complex, indeed ambiguous. However, if there is any truth in such propositions - which have, after all, been made by many prominent commentators, such as Panofsky, Heer, Blumenberg, Foucault, Eco, Kristeva - we may no doubt assume that literary texts will have responded and in turn contributed, in a variety of ways, to these processes of cultural transformation. It seems of considerable interest, therefore, to take a close look at the complex, precarious position which literature, as basically a symbolic mode of signification, held in the perennial struggles and discursive negotiations between the semiotic 'twin paradigms' of nominalism and realism. This collection of essays (many of them by leading scholars in the field) is a first comprehensive attempt to tackle such issues - by analyzing representative literary texts in terms of their underlying semiotic orientations, specifically of nominalism, but also by studying pertinent historical, theoretical and discursive co(n)texts of such developments in their relation to literary discourse. At the same time, since 'literary nominalism' and 'realism' are conceived as fundamentally aesthetic phenomena instantiating a genuinely 'literary debate over universals', consistent emphasis is placed on the discursive dimension of the texts scrutinized, in an endeavour to re-orient and consolidate an emergent research paradigm which promises to open up entirely new perspectives for the study of literary semiotics, as well as of aesthetics in general. Historical focus is provided by concentrating on the English situation in the era of transition from late medieval to early modern (c. 1350-1650), but readers will also find contributions on Chrétien de Troyes and Rabelais, as well as on the 'aftermath' of the earlier debates - as exemplified in studies of Locke and (post)modern critical altercations, respectively, which serve to point up the continuing relevance of the issues involved. A substantial introductory essay seeks to develop an overarching theoretical framework for the study of nominalism and literary discourse, in addition to offering an in-depth exploration of the 'nominalism/realism-complex' in its relation to literature. An extensive bibliography and index are further features of interest to both specialists and general readers.

Have children ever really had a literature of their own? In Sticks and Stones, Jack Zipes explores children's literature, from the grissly moralism of Slovenly Peter to the hugely successful Harry Potter books, and argues that despite common assumptions about children's books, our investment in children is paradoxically curtailing their freedom and creativity. Sticks and Stones is a forthright and engaging book by someone who cares deeply about what and how children read.

Analyzes how the folktale has influenced the development of narrative theory and how postmodern fiction has drawn on the folktale to experiment with diverse narrative concepts. In this wide-ranging and insightful analysis, Stephen Benson proposes a poetics of narrative for postmodernism by placing new emphasis on the folktale. Postmodernist fictions have evidenced a return to narrative—to storytelling centered on a sequence of events, rather than a "spiraling" of events as found in modernism—and recent theorists have described narrative as a "central instance of the human mind." By characterizing the folktale as a prime embodiment of narrative, Benson relates folktales to many of the theoretical concerns of postmodernism and provides new insights into the works of major writers who have used this genre, which includes the subgenre of the fairy tale, in opening narrative up to new possibilities. Benson begins by examining the key features of folktales: their emphasis on a chain of events rather than description or consciousness, their emphasis on a self-contained fictional environment rather than realism, the presence of a storyteller as a self-confessed fabricator, their oral and communal status, and their ever-changing state, which defies authoritative versions. He traces the interactions between the folktale and Italo Calvino’s Fiabe Italiane, between selected fictions of John Barth and the Arabian Nights, between the work of Robert Coover and the subgenre of the fairy tale, and between the "Bluebeard" stories and recent feminist retellings by Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood. The arguments presented will interest not only folklorists and scholars of narrative but also readers in fields ranging from comparative literature to feminist theory.

An illustrated guide to a surrealist Paris. At the Cinema l'Ange des Sables, they show only movies shot in the desert, while in the Cafe Dada you insert food into an automatic dispenser and get money. By the author of The Red Shoes.

The basic rules governing the use of periods, semicolons, hyphens, commas, and other punctuation marks are illustrated by original explanations and humorous sample sentences. Reprint.